In this discussion about Celonis’ Celosphere 2022 conference in Munich, Tom Smith is joined by Celonis CMO Dave Peterson, and Bob Evans, founder of Cloud Wars and Chief Content Officer of Acceleration Economy. The three discuss their main takeaways from Celosphere, which took place on November 9 and 10.
Highlights
01:15 — Dave says the energy and excitement from being together again were invigorating. He notes that there is something unique about Celonis ecosystem of partners and customers. Partners enjoyed having a place to convene, scheme, be creative, and give themselves permission to keep driving change in their organization. “You can’t create that, you can’t market it, you can’t invent that, it just happens or it doesn’t happen and it definitely happened.”
03:42 — About 2,400 people — the facility’s maximum capacity — attended, plus another 10,000 online. By the time it’s all said and done with on-demand, total attendance and participation will probably be 25,000 to 30,000.
04:40 — Bob says there was significant discussion of the scale of Celonis technology, which is important because as businesses move into the digital economy, processes being evaluated are going to get bigger, becoming more vital and strategic. Scaling is also happening in terms of messaging, positioning, customer acceptance, and customer awareness. Now the need is to harness that scale in service of business goals: be smarter, be more accessible to customers, do business the way they want, and move more quickly.
06:58 — Dave says that for the first time, you can feel people embracing the notion that it is okay to admit you don’t know what you don’t know. Technology/systems are working okay but when you shine that X-ray, or now an MRI, on your business, you find something that you didn’t know was there. In the past, that was a problem but now, people are celebrating that it is okay to get inside the system, see how a business is really working, celebrate change, and go drive the actions to get the top, bottom, or green line value.
09:21 — Bob notes that businesses are developing new revenue streams and engaging with customers in entirely different ways. The ability to have intelligent technology helps keep us from veering off into unknown areas we do not want to get into — and helps us master the areas that we do — is more important than ever.
10:22 — Dave discusses new products introduced at Celosphere. Process Sphere allows people to find more unknowns in more rich ways. Business Miner makes Process Mining easier, as it takes the barriers out of the way. Celonis’ engineering teams have made it easy for the whole business to participate, and therefore you get the enthusiasm versus the fear and uncertainty.
12:37 — What stood out for Tom was the broadening of the Celonis product portfolio with entirely new applications: sustainability in collaboration with ISVs and customer partners; new applications in accounts receivable as a result of an acquisition; partnering with an E-commerce vendor, Emporix, to have Celonis technology in its e-commerce engine. co-CEO Alex Rinke said the Emporix relationship is a new consumption model for Celonis technology: having developers putting it in other systems. Finally, there was the addition of insurance industry functionality into execution management, with another customer partner, ERGO Group.
15:17 — Dave references the shared sense of mission that was apparent at the event. Understanding where the real problems are not only helps your business, but can also help the green line, because for every inefficiency, a user is either wasting time, money, or creating unnecessary carbon impact. Before, that might have sounded like some kind of West Coast tree-hugging fun thing that was easy to say, but hard to prove. It’s the customers who are driving that now. They are the ones pulling sustainability data into the execution management system.
17:12 — Dave closes with: “I’ve spent a lot of time in the enterprise, and very rarely did I think I was doing some real good in the world…It was very humbling to hear about Lufthansa and Mars and how all of them correlate their day-to-day operations to something that actually has a higher-order value, something you might want to talk about at the dinner table.”
In-depth coverage of Celosphere, Celonis technology, and the company’s strategy:
